'cause it's hard to see from where I'm standin'

Hell, cities have entire personas. Paris is a beautiful woman in her late 40s, once divorced and too smart and self-assured to enter another marriage, but is not against having relations with men on her own terms. New York is a barrel-chested Black transvestite in his early 40s, bombastic and highly theatrical, who doesn’t take shit from anybody. New York and Paris are friends, because of fucking course they are. Paris says some offensive shit sometimes, but New York is used to it and brushes it off as from a person who doesn’t change and can’t harm by it, and while New York openly steals Paris’ fashion choices, so too does Paris from New York, though she would never admit it.

London, eldest of the three and perhaps the most stodgy, yet often invites New York to inject life to his parties. They are business partners, after all, and while the witticisms of New York are almost ad verbatim borrowed by London in other settings, it is indeed London who set New York up in business in the first place. The relationship is far more mutual than that of, say, Chicago, who obsesses over all things New York minus, notably, the “Black” and “transvestite” part. London doesn’t care about such things, so long as the money flows, and indeed they have fruitful dealings and amicably compete over other London proteges, the brothers Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore.

It is an absolutely subjective observation to ascribe personalities to cities, but it shouldn’t and indeed can’t possibly be controversial to suggest that cities exude a form of cultural zeitgeist that defines and differentiates them – from the banal “standing in line” versus “standing on line” to far more deep-seated issues concerning acceptable norms and tolerances pertaining to them – and with that it’s less a form of accurate depiction as it is a narrative that penetrates to the core. How, after all, does a city where the gay rights movement was launched with a street fight between cops and minority transsexuals (a circumstance that Los Angeles attempted to whitewash, but Los Angeles always was a hater), that founded a musical genre and cultural movement named after submissive male prostitution and oozes gender and sexual fluidity (a distinction London completely missed when copying it, natch), whose most famous mayor’s sexual orientation was left intentionally vague, end up producing our current Commander in Chief, who is almost diametrically opposed to all of that: A crude, incurious, insecure, jealous womanizer?

It’s no surprise Trump hates New York – he seems hell-bent on destroying everything about it, in whole and in detail – but it is a surprise that people are surprised that New York hates Trump, a native son. That’s where the personality comes in: New York is well-adjusted and confident, but that doesn’t mean New York is secure in his position. New York is a savvy businessman, a ruthless pirate, a firebrand intellectual, sometimes broke and often lonely. New York is in love with himself because nobody else is, but New York also brokers straight deals with aplomb and has affairs everywhere. New York is always of two faces, between two realities, where even doctrinaire Marxists learn to hustle; where Know-Nothings share neighborhoods with new migrants who then become Know-Nothings; the only city in America where women have a harder time in the dating scene than men because men are intimidated by aggressive, professional women.

That duality pervades everywhere: Where a law and order mayor can show up in drag one day on a lark (and be promptly molested by Donald Trump), where hoodrat nightclubs that are responsible for fully half the murders in the area have at least one gay night a week, despite a self-reporting localized gay population of less than two percent, and it’s by far the most lucrative night. Where doctors working for the CDC have to ask very specific questions to macho, ultra-masculine alphas who don’t think they’re homosexual so long as they’re giving, not receiving. Where a meat market specializing in one gender by night lends its street frontage by day for butt-augmenting lingerie for the other gender, right on the main strip in a heavily-Catholic sleepy residential neighborhood. New York encompasses all types, and does it in full stride while heading to the office, laughing along with the stupid, misogynistic jokes just so the deal can be struck. New York needs to make that face in order to conduct his business with the world, has made peace with that understanding – London taught him well – but carries on without giving a fuck with the rest of his life.

Trump is at times that face, and that face is what some see New York as, but New York is not that face. New York has many faces for business: Among equals, New York had Morgan, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Bloomberg. New York invented Trump to fleece the rubes, the schmucks – after all, New York wants an empire, and you don’t get an empire by playing nice or fair – but Trump was never meant for New York. A city whose arguably best mayor was called Little Flower, who accepts all and embodies all, who is more than a little dirty and likes it that way, while still emanating class and rarified distinction: This city understands the use of masks because it has to, it always had to; even those of arrogant bullies, but that arrogance drawn inwards simply cannot be. It can be sloughed off and discarded when it has lost its use.

Allison Arieff, pundit of the Think Tank SPUR, lamented on the New York Times why we don’t build, in her words, “great urban design projects,” the foremost example of which she gives as the Golden Gate Bridge. To this end, she criticized America’s pattern of deferred maintenance and presented Atlanta’s BeltLine as a creative, visionary model we should aspire to.

I would like to know how Ms Arieff got published in the Times without actually defining what she means by great projects, explaining why there is a strong community-oriented NIMBYism against major projects, or even why major projects like the BeltLine deserve praise. In short, I would like to unpack the assumptions in her article.

What is a Great Project?

To me in the City of New York, home of many grand infrastructural projects, such is not only patently obvious but absolutely necessary to our continued existence. First and foremost among them is how we get our water. The aqueducts and water tunnels that feed New York City are perhaps our greatest urban design project to date and the largest such infrastructural complex of its type in the world, solving once and for all a necessity that has most of the West Coast in dire straits. It’s taken for granted in every home in the city and is lauded as the reason for our famous bagels and pizza.

An infrastructural gem in an understated form

Furthermore, it’s not one we’ve ignored. We have added a third water tunnel under the tutelage of our last mayor, Michael Bloomberg, a project he sank billions of dollars into and is perhaps one of his most uncontroversial positive legacies and certainly one with the potential to be the most long-lasting. It perhaps isn’t sexy, but the benefits are clear as the water in our taps.

We have our bridges – including the George Washington Bridge, still to date the busiest car bridge in the world – and our subways, one of the most comprehensive systems in the world and still the most extensive by station count, and they indeed define us. However, they are also our limitation: We haven’t had a major addition to the subway since the Second World War, and our Hudson River crossings are truly what are limiting our growth as a city and as a region.

Why, then, is there pushback on Great Projects?

This, much to my dismay, is an aspect of the article I found sorely lacking in an article by someone who lives in San Francisco, and thus must have heard of the Freeway Revolts. How can a mention of the Golden Gate Bridge as part of the proactive force of visionary authorities not then mention the Embarcadero Freeway project to link it to the Bay Bridge?

A mention of NIMBYism is incomplete without mention of the force of Robert Moses – by far the single most powerful city planner in America – and of the community revolts under the auspices of writer Jane Jacobs. Moses, who racism and unprecedented unelected power was made infamous thanks to reporter and writer Robert Caro, had great plans in a unitary vision that have defined New York for generations to come, and it is nothing short of a miracle that he was not able to enact more of them. From the Brooklyn-Battery Bridge, a project that took the power of FDR to finally kill, to the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which elevated Jane Jacobs to fame and international regard as the face of its opposition, the Bushwick Expressway and more, “great” does not automatically confer “good.”

What he did build ensured the destruction of great swaths of the Bronx, the segregation of Long Island, the displacement of the poor and minorities, and major infrastructural hurdles for decades if not centuries to come. It is no wonder that the unitary authority of visionary planners isn’t more regarded.

The legacy of Robert Moses

The issue of what should be built now has a significant community backlash, for better or for worse: In the fear of great ills – highways blasting through poorer neighborhoods, the very terms “urban renewal” and “housing project” being stigmatized as pejorative – almost all new projects are viewed with a jaundiced eye. The only things that seem to get past the Community Boards are projects that propose a lot of green space, which brings us to the BeltLine.

What projects should we be promoting?

It is no secret how the Second Avenue Subway line has become a running joke in New York politics as to how grand public works projects almost inevitably wind up as giant albatrosses without end in sight, but it wasn’t so long ago in America that a Great Project was built, and that was the Transbay Tube in San Francisco, the lynchpin of the BART system. Insufficient as it is – it’s not exactly a subway and it’s not exactly commuter rail – it’s been an important part in the development of the Bay Area since its opening in 1972, a reverse of the decision to turn the Bay Bridge into a highway-only bridge (similar to the opportunity lost to turn the lower level of the George Washington Bridge over to rail) and a boon for the whole region. Its continued expansion will allow needed growth and define the Bay Area for generations to come.

Meanwhile, greenways such as the current High Line project or the proposed QueensWay project get green lights and easy funding, even if they contribute little to nothing towards the long-term prospects of the city or the region. They are indeed like the BeltLine in that they are parks built on railroad Rights-of-Way, which present a low-investment return on unused space at the cost of potential growth in the future. That, to me, is not a Great Project, but the tacit admission that no more great projects are feasible.

They are the opposite of visionary plans, and instead mark the craven chopping up of future generations for an easy fix today; a Boomer solution to what was ultimately a Boomer problem to begin with: Deferred maintenance and lack of investment in municipal infrastructure, something Ms Arieff complained about in the first place. If anything, what is needed is a new paradigm, and unfortunately, as with the fad of New Urbanism, if the current think tanks are any indication, one is not forthcoming.

3:15PM. Saturday. 57th Street and Broadway. Light rain, stepped over a sleeping homeless man, less than forty feet from the hole in the ground that’s soon to be Robert Stern’s contribution to Billionaire’s Row, a super-tall super-luxury affordable to perhaps sixty people in the world. Thirty more feet, stepped over another homeless man. Another homeless man another thirty feet later, outside the subway entrance. Two more inside before seeing a uniformed policeman, protecting two bank men in body armor emptying a Metrocard vending machine of its cash reserves.

The nation has just had a heady day, watching Obama sing Amazing Grace at a funeral and laud the Supreme Court verdict on Gay Marriage back-to-back; emotional and surprisingly emotive moments from our president to hang atop our collective consciousness while we continue on our daily toils, though not without inevitable backlash. Obama himself remarked, with little rancor but with deep candor,

“I know change for many of our LGBT brothers and sisters must have seemed so slow for so long, but compared to so many other issues, America’s shift has been so quick.”

A subtle reminder of recent events, highlighting the endlessly re-opened scar tissue of the American fabric, yet still not immune to base punditry, where some ask “what must the African Methodist Episcopal preachers behind Obama during his eulogy have thought about the confirmation of Gay Marriage?” (Quick answer: They are too busy reeling from a Good Ole’ Boy’s salvo towards the last generation’s cultural war – or is it? – to concern themselves with this one.) But such issues can’t help but feel muted in the face of what still needs to be done.

3:30PM, standing on the Uptown IND platform at Columbus Circle, coming home from work installing the equipment of some sixty peons who have been relocated from Connecticut as the vanguard of some six hundred more, holdouts moved against their will to balance some department spreadsheet. Working under a foreman whose wages were cut more than half in the past year, lost his mortgage and stands to lose his job altogether – though even at half his wages he’s still making more than I am. Working above perma-temps who know not to work too fast because these are all the hours they’re going to get, working because any of them would not hesitate to leap and grab my job, even as they remark pityingly about how tenuous and underpaid it appears to be. The corporation posted an 80% boost in profits last year. The corporation also laid off half my department. They’re going to keep waiting. Can I come in early on Monday? Of course I can.

It’s a new experience, to say the least. I’ve been under bosses who would attempt to move heaven and earth so as not to cut staff. “Oh, can you forego raises this year? Oh, can you take a 10% wage cut? Oh, can we have a Friday furlough? Please, I’m trying.” I’ve been under bosses who would rationalize and justify, if to nobody but themselves, the necessity of layoffs. “Oh, she had a bad attitude anyway. Oh, she really didn’t fit in here. Oh, she didn’t act like she really wanted the job.” I’m now under bosses for whom there is no emotive reaction to impending layoffs. They are cheerful coming in, they are cheerful coming out, they do not need excuses, they do not offer any.

In order to feel empathy for other people, first you must recognize them as people. There is a pure, raw, untempered amorality at play here, one which the armies of lowly peons find it hard to adjust to. A tall, lanky young man in a bowtie, a rare white elevator operator, asks me on Friday about my hair. He asks if I ever cut it. I don’t. He admires being able to hold that stance; toying with his bowtie uncomfortably, remarks that he’s sick of the uniform he’s made to wear, admires my freedom. That same day, a security guard remarks that he used to have a mohawk until he interviewed for this job. He can be dismissed at any moment, and many often are, but that hair doesn’t come back so quick.

These are the first overt remarks made about my hair since I started working here, but everybody on all floors recognizes me by sight – the one with the hair. It is, indeed, not de rigueur in the corporate sector, and it has been noted. I am not wearing the uniform. No matter; I’m just as disposable as the rest. Hell, my boss’s boss is the only true non-contractor in our section, and he’s as desperately trying to prove his relevancy as anybody else.

The security guard asks me what I’m doing this weekend. Drinking, I reply. That’s what he does every weekend. A chuckle. There is no future, few talk of the past. There is the grindstone and we put our noses to it; the cultural wars raging on seem so pi in the sky. A place where nobody has careers, we all just have jobs. “You’ll know when my plans come to fruition because I just won’t come in anymore,” explains the field boss, repeatedly. In the meanwhile, the holding pattern.

3:40PM, a D train rolls in, a petite young Muslim motorwoman at the helm, swaddled in a hijab in official MTA blue. The new blue collar working class, coming into a previously black jobs enclave, thanks to the EEOC, the city’s civil service exams and racism in the private sector. The next generation. Progress. Visible progress. As one issue gets addressed, another comes, and another; the admixture being what we call society.

Our illustrious mayor is reduced to applying palliative care with our ongoing job prospects and housing problems thanks to the callous indifference of the governor and the inability for the president to intervene in any meaningful way, but we all yet try to make do, and there is movement here and there, around the edges. Last month Muslim holidays got put on public calendars. Last week Chinese holidays got the same. Two days ago the Supreme Court confirmed the Affordable Care Act. Yesterday, Gay Marriage. I go home to shower and change and prepare for the night’s drinking. I drink to commiserate. I drink to celebrate. I drink.

To the black dude in the pink bike shorts and the lime green road bike:

Sorry I had to cut off our reverie bombing up Broadway, but the cop two blocks behind us with the flashing lights heading up the wrong way is a known entity who has likely had a hard-on for me ever since I beat four of his tickets two years ago. By splitting up I at least kept his attention away from you, and by keeping my nose clean as he followed me zig zagging through the neighborhood I frustrated his efforts. The hoods on my block found much merriment watching the squad car prowl by, and were quick to remind me that it’s approaching the end of the month.

To your question as to whether you’ve seen me before, you have. We once shared a commute up Riverside Drive where you got into some altercation with some lady in a car with Jersey plates for not giving you enough room on the shoulder – though, to be fair, on Riverside Drive, despite being an official “bike route,” there is no shoulder – and you had asked me the same question you asked me this time: How can I act so “zen” riding a bicycle on the streets of New York?

As to that question, when you find much to complain about people’s driving habits in this city, it’s not so much about taking it personally as it is about never expecting people to do right (and thus never being disappointed by their behavior), and as such reducing everything and everybody to base equations of velocity and direction. I’d liken it to video gaming, but I often find video games frustrating because the computer cheats. You can’t cheat physics.

I hope you made it to Riverdale alright, and I’m kinda surprised at the serendipity of seeing you (I think) along with a dozen other dudes bombing up Sixth Ave right as I got out of work, swarming the yellow cabs and express buses in our trek to the far north, occupying the space between the pragmatic application of the law and the reasonable acceptance of the public – that grey area where everybody actually lives. As I continue to play the corporate whore, and as gentrification threatens to swallow us whole, it’s heartening to have a little slice of the city which I can call my domain; to leave my mark.

There was an argument I had with a Jamaican coworker a couple of months ago as to my self-identity. He took umbrage at my stated mixed heritage when asked by my boss – who brought up the subject primarily as a means of finding common ground. I could not be both black and white, he said. I have to choose. This sparked a debate among the largely Caribbean Black work crew, one that only got louder when I said, “if that’s the case, then by the one-drop rule, I’m Black.”

“But you can’t be Black.” Well then, let’s just strike right at the heart of it, why don’t we?

I am Tsalagi, Irish and Black; my boss was happy with the “Black” part, the field boss used such knowledge with a fair bit of tongue-in-cheek ribaldry – every time I fucked up on the job or kissed up to some high muckety-muck unnecessarily, that must be my “white half,” – but my fair skin, blonde hair and green eyes were too much for this one man to take. I’m white, he argued, because I could never truly have the Black experience.

It’s true, I could never truly have the “Black” experience: When my biological mother would take us on vacation in St Maarten, groundsworkers and clerks assumed she was my nanny. I could, at the age of five, successfully hail cabs in New York better than her. But her side of the family is Black, I am biologically Black, and common knowledge of such is and would have been enough to dictate my trajectory for much of America’s history. In fact, to describe myself would involve literally taking a page from the autobiography of former NAACP leader Walter Francis White:

“I am not white. There is nothing within my mind and heart which tempts me to think I am. Yet I realize acutely that the only characteristic which matters to either the white or the colored race – the appearance of whiteness – is mine. There is magic in a white skin; there is tragedy, loneliness, exile, in a black skin. Why then do I insist that I am a Negro, when nothing compels me to do so but myself?”

White, a man of mixed heritage whose mixed-heritage parents were both born into slavery, could pass as white. Anita Hemmings, first Black graduate of Vassar College, did pass, and so did her husband and children; one of whom indeed had to in order to graduate from Vassar thirty years later. Passing has been a storied part of a color-struck community in a color-struck world – Blacks who could pass infiltrated whites-only vigilante groups and organizations as a means to funnel weaponry for self-defense during the race riots after WWI, were able to report on systemic discrimination more freely throughout the Jim Crow era, or simply hid in order to escape the trials of day-to-day bigotry.

It’s with this point of view, as a white Black man, as somebody who has always “passed” and exploited such at every possible turn, that I view the actions of Spokane NAACP chapter leader Rachel Dolezal to be the height of cultural appropriation. The allegations that have come out – that she as a white woman with no Black heritage represented herself with a self-styled Black and sometimes Native American identity in order to gain scholarships or employment positions, that she lied about her own experiences and upbringing, including having suffered from discrimination, that she then used said image to become an authority on race and from said position make some truly questionable statements – paint the picture of a person whose actions are that of a sociopath and a narcissist.

To speak to just how hurtful it has been to the goals of the NAACP and of the national Black community, I am reminded of a passage by Malcolm X of “sincere white allies:”

“I have these very deep feelings that white people who want to join black organizations are really just taking the escapist way to salve their consciences. By visibly hovering near us, they are “proving” that they are “with us.” But the hard truth is this isn’t helping to solve America’s racist problem. The Negroes aren’t the racists. Where the really sincere white people have got to do their “proving” of themselves is not among the black victims, but out on the battle lines of where America’s racism really is—and that’s in their own home communities; America’s racism is among their own fellow whites. That’s where sincere whites who really mean to accomplish something have got to work.

“Aside from that, I mean nothing against any sincere whites when I say that as members of black organizations, generally whites’ very presence subtly renders the black organization automatically less effective. Even the best white members will slow down the Negroes’ discovery of what they need to do, and particularly of what they can do—for themselves, working by themselves, among their own kind, in their own communities.

“I sure don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, but in fact I’ll even go so far as to say that I never really trust the kind of white people who are always so anxious to hang around Negroes, or to hang around in Negro communities. I don’t trust the kind of whites who love having Negroes always hanging around them. I don’t know—this feeling may be a throwback to the years when I was hustling in Harlem and all of those red-faced, drunk whites in the after hours clubs were always grabbing hold of some Negroes and talking about ‘I just want you to know you’re just as good as I am—.’ And then they got back in their taxicabs and black limousines and went back downtown to the places where they lived and worked where no blacks except servants had better get caught. But, anyway, I know that every time that whites join a black organization, you watch, pretty soon the blacks will be leaning to the whites to support it, and before you know it a black may be up front with a title, but the whites, because of their money, are the real controllers.”

He’s describing, effectively, cultural tourism. Not for nothing does it feel suspect that this white woman would choose to wear a perm and make judgments about race – including some comments about the Blackness of Afro-Latinos that Latina community organizer Rosa Clemente took issue with, as well as a further allegation that she denied a Latina student the ability to participate in a discussion about race because she didn’t look Latina enough – as it does, apart from being extremely hypocritical, speak to the very issue as to how this can stall progress if not start a regression altogether. The very core of the debate about race – the inability to change who you are and how you are defined by the public – is both dismissed and subverted by her. The topic is now about her: She derailed the national discourse into one about her.

It reads like a scene out of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, and a slap in the face of those whose actual heritage is often questioned. I am too white to be Black, too American to be Irish, too urban to be Indian, and yet I am all those things. I am also not what I’m not: My skin isn’t dark, my hair isn’t nappy, my accent indistinct. My experiences are what they are. They don’t match the given narrative very often, and I don’t attempt to make them (A cow don’t make ham). Why would I? I am authentic enough as to what I am as I am. It is hard enough being me without being somebody else.

Jerry Seinfeld has come out to complain about how difficult it is to do comedy in today’s politically correct world. This is amusing, because Seinfeld hasn’t been funny in years. “I could imagine a time where people would say, ‘that’s offensive to suggest that a gay person moves their hands in a flourishing notion, and you need to apologize,'” Seinfeld argued recently in an interview. “There’s a creepy, PC thing out there that really bothers me.”

Comedians have always dealt in the taboo. Seinfeld in his heyday dealt in the taboo, the wanton opinions of the characters in his eponymous sitcom series the most obvious example. However, dealing in the taboo doesn’t by itself make one edgy, offensive or avant garde. How one handles the taboo determines such. A good comedian is incisive and insightful; peeling away sore spots of society like an onion and allowing us to ease up on ourselves. Seinfeld used to be the king at this with his observational humor. What a bad comedian is is dismissive and cavalier; alienating certain people in order to evoke laughs from others.

The question as to why this “gay people wave their hands like this” (itself evoking overtones of “black people walk like this”) would be offensive is as simple as figuring out what the punchline is and what it’s directed at. Louis CK, for instance, famously does bits where he comes to terms with his own inborn racism. This turns the punchline on himself, as well as finding human parallels with his audience. What would be the punchline when it comes to how gay people act? It has to be more than simply “they’re different, and that’s funny.”

This is why “oh, such and such offends everybody equally” is not an excuse: Because the type of humor, even when broaching taboo topics, need not be offensive. If the butt of your joke is an entire people, maybe you should rethink the joke. Not the subject – the butt. The subject can be any fucking thing you want, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. Rape jokes aren’t inherently offensive, nor holocaust jokes or any other sensitive subject. Rape victim jokes, however… just ask Daniel Tosh, who got an immediate backlash for attempting to shut down a heckler with, “wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now?”

As example, I think South Park is shrill; a soapbox for two people who are little more than elevated internet commentators – their humor caustic, their targets simply lambasted on a larger stage, their acceptability predicated solely on the acceptability of denouncing their targets; fine when it’s Scientology in the crosshairs, not fine when it’s multiculturalism. Another elevated internet commentator, with all the implications there-in, is Dane Cook. I think Jeff Dunham is an abomination who plays to the base bigotry of his audience. I think Adam Sandler was never funny, and his entire career – along with proteges such as Seth Rogen – was based on cheap, lazy humor that paints in broad-stroke caricature.

By contrast, I think Dave Chappelle was able to toe the line of taboo because he understood the nature of that issue. His targets were stereotypes, not people. I know he quit initially because audience members started taking his punchlines to be broad-strokes caricatures – he hated when people started shouting back his Rick James skits to him, just as Chris Rock hated when people would start reading into his “two kinds of Black people” skit, turning him into an ersatz minstrel show. I think In Living Color was a fantastic example of how taboo topics could be broached, and in my opinion it launched the careers of funnier comedians than Saturday Night Live ever did, even if their seminal Chevy Chase / Richard Pryor skit was legendary.

It’s not about the topics. It’s about the punchlines, and if Seinfeld can’t figure that out, he’s about as unlovable as his television persona was.

In a nutshell

Words of an urban indian. Musings on the nature of civilized society, city forms and bureaucratic processes, class and race consciousness, complaining, ranting and more ranting, along with whatever the hell else piques one's interest nowadays.

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To quote H. L. Mencken, "The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office."